This week I’m heading out to the Ad:Tech conference in San Francisco. Electronic marketing isn’t my traditional beat, but I have a rule about never turning down a conference being held near renowned Chinese restaurants.
Ad:Tech also provides a chance to immerse myself in a medium I saw during its nascent stages. I started writing for Direct in the late 1990s, when online marketers were declaring they were going to change the rules of marketing. Considerations such as margin, customer information gathering and even long-term viability were given short shrift.
Many business plans at the time amounted to little more than getting something – anything – up and running, and then selling it and letting someone else figure out how to make it profitable. Any number of these should have set off “phonus bolognus” detectors – but the industry’s ability to detect phony baloney took a multi-year leave during the dot-com craze.
In the late ‘90s I spoke with the president of a Web site that was created to allow consumers to lodge complaints against online retailers. It was a most disconcerting interview, as the president’s voice had recently changed and would frequently crack. This service would be free for consumers: The revenue model was that retailers would pay for the privilege of being griped at by the Web site, rather than relying on their own in-house contact mechanisms.
This meeting took place in that same year when many Internet retailers faced fulfillment problems beyond their wildest imagination. These consumed a fair number of marketers – remember eToys? People that do largely don’t do so fondly.
That was then. This is now. A quick glance at the Ad:Tech program shows how fully the industry has returned to sanity. There are sessions on knowing one’s customers, reconciling online and offline behavior, and – whoda thunk it? – generating return on investment. They all sound great, and I hope I can work a few of them between egg rolls.
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